Sometimes I enjoy reading multiple books by an author back to back to immerse myself in his or her style. It makes me feel like an insider to recognize syntax patterns, common themes and tropes, commonalities when it comes to figurative language. This week, I read two books by Julia Stuart, a journalist who has--sadly for the book-loving world--only published three novels so far. (Oh wait! I just checked...four! Time for another online book purchase, honey!) I have read these novels (the three I knew about, that is) many times and enjoyed them for their wit, their phenomenal character development, and their celebration of the beautiful value of life in both its high and low moments.
Review: The Matchmaker of Perigord
Guillaume Ladoucette has been a barber in his home village of Amour-sur-Belle in southwestern France for all of his life. Even as a toddler, he showed a genius for trimming, pulling his mother's scissors from her mending basket and snipping away at the living room curtains, fashioning the fabric into an exact replica of the elaborate limbs and branches of walnut tree in the front yard. He loves barbering, finding delight in the art of making the hair on his neighbors' heads perfectly suit their personalities and head shapes.
His perfect contentment, though, is attacked on two fronts: First, his neighbor's chicken (known as the infernal Violetta) keeps sneaking into his house and leaving feathers, droppings, peck marks, tracks, and eggs in the most obscene places, such as his butter dish, his clean laundry, and the seat of his favorite chair. He is both repulsed and terrified of her uncanny ability to break into his carefully chicken-proofed home. Secondly, he has noticed that his customers have begun to frequent scissor-wielding hands that are not his, sporting hairstyles that offend his sense of dignity and rightness. That, and many of his other customers have grown completely bald.
Faced with what will soon be an empty barbershop, Guillaume decides to close that business and open up a new one: He will be the village matchmaker, even though he has never told the woman he loves that he loves her, quietly continuing to read the letter she sent him 26 years before and carefully oiling the hunting knife she left in his possession--but unable to communicate his own feelings.
The book follows Guillaume's earnest but unsuccessful attempts to match up the wildly odd inhabitants of his village: a fastidious dentist, a soulful baker, an ambulant fishmonger, a greedy grocer, a beautiful midwife, a postman who can't hold his bladder, and many others.
It is just pure fun, and I love love love reading it and chuckling about the antics of the characters. Also, Stuart mentions their food and drink often, detailing the dishes of the French countryside in a way that makes me start hunting up my passport and packing my bags while I think I'm still reading. If you enjoy humor, wit, good food and drink, and fantastic character development--along with a tale of steadfast true love, you will enjoy this book.
In this novel, Balthazar Jones, Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London, is given the task of preparing the Tower to accept a menagerie of animals that have been given to the queen by various foreign governments. Apparently, the Tower was once the royal menagerie, but then the animals were moved to the London Zoo when it opened. But the zoo had become too crowded, and the queen thought animals at the Tower would draw more visitors there.
Balthazar is skeptical of this plan, especially when the agent informs him that the main reason he has been chosen to prepare for the animals' arrival is that he is the owner of the world's oldest tortoise, Mrs. Cook, who is 108 years old and is, according to the stories, the daughter of a tortoise captured by the famous Captain Cook himself. Balthazar recognizes that this is a doubtful qualification, but he is not one to shirk the command of his monarch.
Balthazar sighs, shrugs, and does what he is asked, but his heart is not in this job, and it hasn't been since the terrible day four years before when his beloved son, Milo, died. Balthazar and his wife, Hebe, have been living as strangers since that day, neither able to talk about it or grieve together, both still wrapped in their shock and the emptiness of loneliness. She goes to her job each day at the London Underground's Lost and Found counter, where she and her co-worker, Valerie Jennings, accept and safeguard lost items, hoping the owners will turn up asking for them. They also spend their time trying to hunt down the owners of the more important, interesting items. Balthazar goes about his job, keeping tiny glass bottles in his pockets, in which he collects rainwater, having learned to identify by smell each different type of rain.
The animals do come to the zoo, eventually. (That is, most of them do: The penguins get lost along the way and have an adventure of their own.) And many of the tower's Yeoman Warders and other residents develop attachments to various animals, delighting in watching them eat and sleep and interact. But while Balthazar grows attached to the animals in his care, he loses his connection to Hebe, for she cannot understand why he hasn't yet wept for Milo.
This book is just beautiful. Even though it is so, so sad to witness the devastation of Balthazar and Hebe's loss, there still beauty in the way they remember their son and the love they had--and still have--for each other. Along the way, the book is also jammed with other delights, with history about the tower and--more memorably--excellent characters, like the priest who designs and builds elaborate devices to rid the chapel of the devious rats that nibble the vestments (and who also has secretly written award-winning erotic novels under a pseudonym, even though he cannot find the courage to tell the woman he loves how he feels) and Valerie Jennings, who works with Hebe and loves to try on the costumes and hats left on the subway, quietly falling in love with the tattooed former sailor who brings far too many things to the lost and found counter.
Read this book if you like to smile around a lump in your throat, if you like English history and natural history, if you love reading about characters who are quirky and full of life, with stories to tell and hearts that yearn for love.
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